How To Motivate the Unmotivated

Most developers have, at one point in their career, worked in a group; it’s inevitable if you’re working on a large project. If you’ve worked in a large group you most likely have met one developer that has been less motivated than the others and this post is for you.

Motivating the unmotivated can be a difficult task for a manager. You have to know how to motivate them and not make them feel unwanted. If you try to hard, the programmer will feel like you’re trying to push them away, but if you don’t try hard enough the developer isn’t doing everything they could be.

Here are a few tips on motivating developers.
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5 Tips to Overcome Language Barriers

With the combination of growing multiculturalism and increased overseas outsourcing, there is a greater demand on communication skills than ever before. Not only do you need to be able to explain yourself and understand others, but you need to do this regardless of their native tongue. Here are a few tips that I’ve found to be helpful in my dealings with people who speak another language, or have a very heavy accent that I find hard to understand.
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Why Every Blog Should Have a Blog Plan

In the development world, we create plans for pretty much every thing we write, but when it comes to the blogging world I’ve found that a number of people don’t think of creating a plan for their blog. As bloggers, we can increase our blogs success by developing plans for our blogs.

Here are a few tips for creating your own blog plan.
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July: A Month in Review

Here at devjargon, we have just finished our first full month of existence (we pre-posted for May and launched on June 6th), and has it ever been fun.  We’ve had a number of great posts, talked with a number of great people and had traffic beyond what we’ve ever had in any of our previous blogs.

Here are a few of our favourite posts this month:

We’re also please to have release our “Ask Us” section that allows you as readers to ask your IT related questions.  We just launched it recently so we haven’t gotten any enquiries yet, but you could be the first.

Not only have we posted a few good articles, we’ve also read a number of great development blogs from around the blogosphere.  A couple fo my favourites are: Girl Developer, I Hate My IT Guy, LinuxHaxor, Coding Horror and many, many more.

Just before we end this post I’d like to shout out to our first sponsor Laptopical. If you’re planning on buying a laptop any time soon, I’d check them out first because they have a number of in-depth laptop reviews that are worth checking out.

We’re looking forward to August and have a number of great things planned for this blog, so stay tuned.

The Ultimate Development Workstation

To a developer, their desk is like athelete’s equipment; vital to occupation. If a hockey players stick breaks because it’s quality is sub-par they could lose a game. The same goes to a developers desk, if the desk isn’t stocked with the correct equipment it could impair the developer in their work.

Here are 10 things that every developer should have at their desk.
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Creating Software: Start Coding

Software takes a long time to make. You first need to get the requirements from the client. Once you’ve gotten the requirements you then need to spend the time to properly design your product, drawing out paper prototypes, creating use case diagrams and other things like that.

Now that you’ve done all that, we’ll have a look at the third part of the Creating Software series: Starting to Code. Today we’ll look at different ways to code and the importance of testing as you code not afterwards.
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Breaking Free From the Analytical Mold

We, as developers, are required to be analytical to solve the problems that arise in day to day work. We use our analysis skills to break a problem down into smaller parts and offer solutions to each one, and in turn, create a solution to the larger problem.

While this is great, and it typically solves all the problems we run across, I’ve noticed that it begins to get into our code as well, making it overly procedural. We begin to think just like computers work – logical and procedural.
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This Weeks Top 5 Links

Devjargon is coming up on our 2 month anniversary and we’re still going strong. We’re still looking for guest posts so you can drop us a line at our contact page.

One new thing we’ve added is the “Ask Us” section. Here you can ask us anything about technology, software development, programming or really anything you want, and we’ll answer them as they come in. We’re really excited about this and we hope we can help you with your questions. Here are our favourite articles this week:

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10 Great Firefox Plugins

Firefox is a great browser. If you’re a web developer you’ve come to love it because of its adherence to web standards and the ease of making your websites look nice. I know a lot of people though, that just use Firefox as is and don’t bother to dive into the world of add-ons to customize their browsing experience.

Here are 10 great plugins that help make your Firefox experience better (in no specific order).
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6 Great IDEs for Development

Every developer I know has, at one point or another, used an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). IDEs make our lives easier, providing an all-in-one tool which gives you a text editor, compiler, debugger and many other things that help with development.

Without IDEs, you need to get all of the different tools and that can really clutter up your computer. Here are 6 of the best IDEs that I’ve stumbled across as a developer (in no particular order).
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